Samsung Bixby sending email when asked to text, but there's a fix

Samsung’s virtual assistant Bixby, apparantly giving company to Google Assistant and Siri, has things falling out of place every now and then. What’s now coming to light is that Bixby when commanded to send a text ends up sending an email.

For quite long, Samsung users (operating different devices) have been complaining of Bixby sending text messages to email address of the recipient instead of their mobile number. And all this despite contact number set as default for sending texts.

So basically, Bixby is sending the text through the messaging app, to the email address, not to the mobile number. Not only the official help forum, similar reports can be seen on Reddit and Twitter as well.

https://twitter.com/ItalianDragn/status/936762628801683456
https://twitter.com/LaurenG1113/status/898019383896834052

Apart from email, there also are stray reports of Bixby wrongly sending the messages to landline or smartwatch numbers instead of the mobile number.

Going by what’s being highlighted, looks like sending messages through Bixby is not an easy task, not as easy as Google Assistant for sure. It appears to be an issue with Bixby not understanding simplified text commands. Here’s how one can make it work by breaking down the process into a series of commands:

Not only users, even a Samsung moderator is suggesting those affected to try the aforementioned workaround or use Google Assistant instead of Bixby.

As Google Assistant can offer the same behavior as Bixby, we do offer both as a solution as both are included in our devices

It’s not for the first time that Samsung is recommending its mobile device users to switch to Google provided services as a workaround for its broken functionalities. If you remember, the tech giant suggested Galaxy Note8/S8 owners to use ‘Google voice typing’ as a substitute for the broken voice input feature.

Apart from aforementioned, following are some other user suggested workarounds that you can try hands on:

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